Recently, I got back into my mobage phase again. Even though I have my Switch right there with plenty of unfinished games to play, my brain would rather grind through free App Store games right now. A recent addition to my iPod Touch's small collection of F2P otome is The King of Fighters For Girls. It's a Japan exclusive game that has all of the usual mobage stuff, like gacha and grinding mini-games. You can still download it from abroad if you use a Japanese iTunes/Google Play account, or there are subbed gameplay videos on YouTube.
I'm not too familiar with KOF lore, because I've only played a few of the games so far. All I know are the characters and a few basic plot facts, that's it. KOF For Girls goes over the main stuff anyway, so you really don't need any background information to start.
The main cast of love interests include most of the series' popular male characters. During my time playing I haven't run into a single female character at all, aside from one random backgrounder. It's not that surprising, since the writers probably want all of the male attention to be on the heroine. There are also two exclusive characters made for this game: Nagi and Yomi. They look a lot like your typical otome bishounen and don't interest me too much. Yomi I know literally nothing about yet, but Nagi I think is a bit of a creep. Normally I would be into characters like him, but I've seen so many at this point that I don't care anymore.
The game had a lot more voice acting than I expected. The whole prologue had a lot of voiced lines. Each character was voiced aside from the side characters and the heroine. The remainder of the story wasn't completely silent either, it had that weird partial voice acting some games use where the characters go "oh!" and "ah!" every line. Sometimes I find that slightly annoying, but at least it sort of adds to the immersion a bit more?
One thing that did stand out to me was that the game's opening song was a character song. Yes, that's right - this game has character songs! For some reason I can't find the opening on YouTube, but I managed to find an entire album's worth of group songs to enjoy. There are honestly loads of them, they must sell well if they decided to make that many.
One of the best things about KOF For Girls is that it seems you can read the story at your leisure. There's no chapter tickets or grinding required! There are loads of chapters, probably enough to keep one busy for a few weeks. But then I wondered why there was still a battle mini-game included, and then I realised.
You see, the main story of the game (I'll get to the plot later, honest) doesn't seem to have any romance. The MC just gets a massive friendship harem all to herself. You're probably wondering, "Wait a minute, where's the romance?" It's locked behind side stories and gacha cards. There's a whole tab where you get to select from a large list of characters and pick one of their episodes. Each character seems to have a lot to choose from, enough to count as a whole route. I think the stories let the MC develop a romantic relationship with the chosen boy, except I didn't get to read enough of them to tell. The trouble is that if you want to unlock them, you have to rank up the chosen love interest in the training and battle mini-game. At least I think you do, I'm not entirely sure. But I can't unlock any of the romance parts because whenever I try to start the mini-game, I get some kind of server error. Looks like I'll just be sticking to the main story then.
Out of all the side stories, I really only managed to read the beginning of Bao's. He seems to treat the heroine as a sister, which is cute. Let's hope it doesn't form into romance, because that would just be creepy. I wanted to play Iori's story (he's my favourite) but it was all locked. I suppose I'll have to find a way past that server error if I want to read it.
Now, let's get to the main plot. The story is that you, the heroine, get a job as a manager for Kyo's team. The only problem is that our MC is unqualified and has literally no idea what she's doing. She basically does all of the cooking and cleaning, gets lost a lot and grabs the attention of every man. In the bits I read so far, she gets introduced to KOF and meets the main cast. She also gets attacked by these weird zombie people, and Nagi sends her weird letters and calls her stuff like "My Princess". I think the MC's going to turn out to be The Chosen One or something strange like that. The story's nothing special, but I enjoy the character interactions. I wish the MC could do something more than just cook and clean, why can't she be a fighter? Most of the screen time so far has been spent with Kyo and his friends, which is fine if you like them. The other characters'll probably appear more later on.
The story will hopefully get more interesting later on. It's still decent fan-service and slice-of-life fluff. Everyone seems to be good friends and they mostly treat the MC nicely. If you like to self insert into your otome, it'll be quite easy to do so here. The heroine doesn't really have a backstory, and it's possible to customise her name however you want. Obviously the name isn't voiced, you just get called things like "Manager-chan". At one point I was dumb and thought they were actually saying my name, it took me a few seconds to realise that was impossible.
You can also get extra content by playing the gacha. I had enough free coins to try it out for a bit, obviously I'm not going to pay a single penny for that. The cards are pretty, I suppose, but you could probably find the artwork all online somewhere. It's possible to set your favourite card as your home screen and get exclusive voice clips. Luckily the game seems to be generous with giving the player free coins, it's quite easy to play entirely for free. I don't mind the art they use for the cards, it's quite pretty, but nothing truly amazing. There are also limited time event stories, but because I never bother with them I have nothing to say.
In general, this game isn't anything special, but I also think it's quite decent for a free title. If you're a KOF fan and just want some fan-service, it's good for that. At first I thought it fit more into the joseimuke genre, but the romantic side stories (which are really just character routes) make it count as an otome for me. It runs well on my 2015 model iPod Touch, although the loading can be a bit slow at times. At least it's not one of those games that requires the latest version of iOS to run. I feel like I'll probably forget about this one like I do with most mobile apps, but right now I'm enjoying it.
If you visit the official website, there are some interesting things to be found, such as this wallpaper:
This concludes my first proper post of the year. I want to try and write a lot more than I did last year, and keep this blog running strong. There'll probably be more mobage posts coming up soon, since I'm still nowhere close to completing any console games. Thank you for reading! 💖
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